Next year WITT celebrates its 40th birthday. In Connections we’re talking with former students and staff to look back at the past.
In the fledgling years of the polytech we now know as WITT, night classes helped Angela Parr climb the office ladder.
In 1973, she began her tertiary studies in a building opposite the Daily News on Currie St where she forged ahead in her shorthand and typing skills.
She was working for the Ministry of Transport at the time and to progress from junior, to intermediate and up to senior, shorthand typists had to sit NZQA exams through the then Taranaki Polytechnic.
They also needed to pass those exams to get a pay rise, says Angela, now the personal assistant to WITT chief executive Richard Handley.
She says the students did Pitmans shorthand, tapped away on electric typewriters and the teachers taught using blackboards.
An intermediate had to take down 80 words per minute in shorthand and reach speeds of 50 words per minute in typing. To become a senior, students had to do 120wpm shorthand and 100wpm typing.
“I crammed it all into the six months because I didn’t just want to do the intermediate,” Angela says.
She went to night class three times a week, faced quite a few exams and a female rival.
“It became a competition because she was faster than me but I thought ‘I’m going to beat you’, ” and she did. “I think I got up to 140 words for shorthand.”
That was a long way from being the slow student forced to do shorthand on the blackboard with Sister Rita at Sacred Heart Girls’ College. “I just couldn’t get it at first”, but the young Angela Sheehan, as she was then, had a sudden breakthrough and ended up being almost top of the class in her last year at school.
“I use it every day (shorthand), all these years later at WITT. I have used it right throughout my career since starting at age 13.”
After marrying, having children and several years out of the workplace, she returned to the polytech in the 1980s to learn computing skills taught by Jean Craven.
“I was terrified,” Angela admits. “It was just so different. It was all electric typewriters when I left (the workplace) and here was this machine I didn’t even know how to switch on.”
But she got the hard word at home. “My husband said to me ‘you either go to polytech and learn how to use it or you become a dinosaur’.”
Angela also learnt a lesson from her young son. “It was when my three-year-old sat at the computer and just starting using it, I thought ‘heavens above, if he can do it then I can’.”
What she didn’t know at the time was her son was a natural. “The first words he spoke were control/alt/delete.”
He’s now a test analyst for a systems management company.
As for Angela, after three months of doing that six-month course she landed a job and hasn’t looked back.
These days her fingers fly over the keyboard. She organises everything through the computer and she still uses good old pen and paper to take down shorthand.
At WITT today, the only shorthand being taught is on the journalism course.